From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Tips for working with Artboards - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Tips for working with Artboards

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- [Instructor] I want to take the next few minutes and show several shortcuts that make working with documents that contain multiple artboards much easier. So on the Layers panel, we can see that as we add multiple artboards to the document, the Layers panel can become quite complex. If I want to limit what I see on the Layers panel to only the artboard that I'm working on, we can target any of the artboards and then change the option here from Kind to Artboard. Now, I will only see the layers that are associated with the artboard that I'm working on. If I need to select a different artboard, I can toggle that off, select another artboard or another layer within another artboard, and then toggle it back on. All right, let's go ahead and change that back to Kind. So just as I can hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows and click on a layer in order to zoom into the contents of that layer, we can do the same thing with an artboard. So I'll hold down the Option key, Alt key on Windows, and then click to zoom into the contents of that artboard. If you have any legacy documents that you want to convert into an artboard, you can choose the Layer menu and then New and select either artboard from Group or artboard from Layers. If I ever want to duplicate an artboard, I can click with the Move tool along the edge of the artboard. That will give me the plus icon, and I can hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows in order to create a duplicate. All right, I'll use Command + Z in order to undo that, and I'm going to select the logo on this layer. And if I drag the logo far enough so that it goes off of the artboard, you'll notice that in the Layers panel, Photoshop has taken it out of the artboard group and put it above all of the artboards. I'll go ahead and use Command + Z to undo that, but if I want to lock a layer so that it can't be dragged beyond the artboard, I can click on this icon in the Layers panel. The only thing that's a little strange is if I drag it far enough, certainly it is still within the layer group, but I can no longer see it, so I'm going to use Command + Z in order to undo that, and I'll unlock that layer. Finally, let's take a look at all three of these documents. If you have elements or assets that are being used in multiple artboards, and you think you might need to make changes to them, it might be better to create a cloud-linked asset instead of having them in each one of the artboards. I'm going to show my Libraries panel, and let's create a new library. We'll just call it KI, and I'll create it. And then I'll target one of the logos, click the plus icon, and choose to add the graphic. Now I can delete the logo from all three of my layers and then drag it from the Libraries panel on top of the artboard. I'll go ahead and reposition it. And when I click Done, we can see that in the first artboard. I'll drag it out again on the second artboard and drag that down, and then we can drag it on the third artboard. I'll just scoot that over, so we can click Done and reposition it. The benefit is that you'll notice each one of these logos now has the cloud icon, and these layers are all linked to this single graphic in my Libraries panel, which means if I, say, double-click on the graphic to open it in its own window and I do something like Command + I in order to invert it, if I select File and then save, and then we close this, we can see that it has been updated in all three of the artboards. All right, let's go ahead and close this document, and I don't need to save the changes. So there we go, a few tips and shortcuts for working with artboards in Photoshop.

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